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The Secret to NuGet’s Success. You!

On a personal level, NuGet has been an immensely satisfying project to
work on. I’ve always enjoyed working on open source projects with an
active community in my spare time, but being able to do it as part of my
day job is really fulfilling.

And I don’t think I’m alone in this as evidenced by this tweet from a
co-worker, Matt Osborn who was contributing to NuGet on his own time
from the early days.

A big part of the satisfaction comes from being able to collaborate with
members of the community, aka you, in a deeper manner than before, which
includes accepting contributions.

If you go to the OSS community site, Ohloh.net, you can see a list of
contributors to
Nuget. As
you might expect, the top five contributors are Microsofties who work on
NuGet as part of their day job. But three of the top ten are external
contributors from the community.

It looks like 21 of the 36 contributors are external. Take these numbers
with a slight grain of salt because we use a distributed version control
system and it appears some developers are counted twice because they
used a different email address on a different computer.

Note to those developers! Create an account on Ohloh.net and claim
those check-ins! Ohloh will provide a merged view of your contributions.

Contributions come in all sizes.We’ve had folks come in and “scratch an
itch” with single commits adding things like support for WiX or the .NET
Micro Framework. Such commits form a key pillar of open source software
as Linus Torvalds stated when discussing a Microsoft patch to
Linux:

I agree that it’s driven by selfish reasons, but that’s how all open
source code gets written! We all “scratch our own itches”.

While other contributions took a lot of work among multiple community
members such as the work to fix Proxy issues within NuGet. We didn’t
have the ability to test the wide range of proxy servers people had in
the wild. Fortunately several folks in our forums worked on this and
tested out daily builds till we got it working in Package Explorer. This
will soon be rolled into NuGet proper. Thanks!

As with most open source projects, commits do not tell the full story of
a community’s contributions to a project. In some cases, these folks
were involved in a lot of design and verification work that ended up
being perhaps one commit.

Our discussion
boards are
full of active participants telling us we’re doing it wrong, or doing it
right, or what we need to do. And that’s great! The commitment of their
time to help us shape a better project is greatly appreciated. Even
those who come in and criticize the product are making a noteworthy
contribution as they’ve taken the time to give us food for thought. As
they say, indifference is worse than hate and we’ve found a lot of folks
who are not indifferent.

If you enjoy using NuGet and have a moment, consider going to the site
and rate
NuGet.

Moving Forward

As well as I think NuGet is doing, I’m by no means satisfied. In fact,
I’m probably one of the most critical people when it comes to where
NuGet is today as compared to where I’d like NuGet to be.

My team is a very small team. If we’re going to make even more progress
than we’ve had, we’re going to need to cultivate contributors, both
drive-by and consistent. That seems to me like the best way to scale out
our development.

If you have tips on how to do that best, do let me know! In the
meanwhile, I’ll brainstorm some ideas on how we can encourage more
people to participate in the development of NuGet.